The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [143]
Gold said, “I wish I could have been in the ballroom with Spelling on election night. Toasting his misery with bad, oaky Chardonnay from a plastic cup.”
Reggie was tired and he was angry and he was not very drunk, but the inside of his skull was numb enough that he shouldn’t have driven. The effects of the whiskey had matured as the hours passed and the buzz slithered from his head, down his throat, slowing his heart. Reggie heard thoughts now that didn’t seem to be in his own voice. If a person hearing voices can have thoughts that are not his own, then what is the difference between your thoughts and someone else’s? Aren’t all thoughts by definition imaginary? Inside the human mind is there any difference between the real and the pretend?
For the first time, Reggie noticed the binder on Gold’s desk. Leather, four rings. Thick with paper pages in plastic sleeves. Reggie had seen a similar object in evidence, and several of the pictures of Erica Liu he had projected in front of the jury had come from a binder just like it. They had come from a collection of applications. Applications for the training orchestra. Applications from Erica Liu’s class.
This binder represented a new class. Students from Juilliard, Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, the New England Conservatory, the Curtis Institute, Cal Arts, the Royal College of Music in London.
Some of the pages had narrow Post-it notes protruding like balconies from the stack. When he’d retrieved it from the prosecution, Erica’s page had had a similar marker.
Gold said, “I know there are people who will come for the requiem. There are people who will come for me.”
Reggie didn’t understand.
“They will want the dirty original—the perfect, dirty original—in my own hand, with all my notes and corrections, my thoughts and inspirations,” Gold said. “If I protect the requiem, the requiem will protect me.”
Reggie tried to hand the manuscript back. “This is my last visit.” He shifted his weight forward in the chair as a prelude to leaving. “Find another attorney, Solomon. I’ll recommend one for your divorce.”
Gold contemplated that. “Why would you think Elizabeth is leaving me?” He looked surprised, even hurt.
Reggie said, “I thought she already had.”
“That woman loves me, Reg. When the requiem is performed for the first time, she will be where she always is, in the seventh row center, I promise. And afterward, Elizabeth and I will eat and drink and make love to celebrate.”
“If you say so,” Reggie said.
Gold said, “You should love me, too. You owe me everything, Reggie. Fame. Money. Every dollar you deposit, every column inch of fawning press you receive, every pretty girl who flirts with her eyes when she passes your table at Charlie Trotter’s.”
The idea made Reggie sick, but he knew it was true.
A dull thump from outside the office. An accidental noise that Reggie would have dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of an old, settling house. Gold knew the sounds of the place far better, and from the intense look on his face, the finger held up in a plea for silence, this one was clearly unfamiliar.
Reggie did not know then (and he could not explain ten years later) why it was that when threatened by the sound of an unknown intruder, his first instinct was to hide the requiem inside his briefcase.
“If I protect the requiem, it will protect me,” Solomon had said.
Before he could react further, amid multiple concussions in his ears, Reggie felt an explosion in his right shoulder.
He collapsed from the chair onto the floor, more from shock than pain, his legs tucking themselves instinctively underneath his torso like a child in an earthquake diving under a desk. His left hand pressed the fabric of his jacket against the wound—two wounds, he would realize later, an entrance and an exit about three inches apart in the muscle of his arm.
He thought he had heard several shots, but as far as he could tell, he had been hit